Sherry Chandler

Native Guard

I would love Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) if it only had this one great poem, “Pastoral,” in which she takes on the icons of southern poetry in a modified sonnet:

In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
…
We’re lining up now — Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons…

But then, on the very next page, she takes on Faulkner in a ghazal.

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

…

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus…

Native Guard takes its title from am elegant crown of sonnets concerning the Louisiana Native Guards, regiments of black soldiers who served with the Union Army. According to the end-notes, seven companies of the Second Louisiana Native Guards were sent to Fort Massachusetts, on Ship Island, to act as guards for Confederate prisoners confined there.

February 1863

We know it is our duty now to keep
white men as prisoners — rebel soldiers,
would-be masters. We’re all bondsmen here, each
to the other…

As those last words hint, Trethewey’s is not a tale of south bad/north good. It’s more north bad/south worse.

December 1862

…Still, we’re called supply units —
not infantry — and so we dig trenches,
haul burdens for the army no less heavy
than before. I heard the colonel call it
nigger work…

These soldiers are fired on in retreat by Union soldiers after one battle and after another, their white commanders refused to look for their wounded or bury their dead. When they were defending Fort Pillow in 1864, Bedford Forrest refused to acknowledge their flag of surrender and instead mowed them down. In a final insulting irony, their graves on Ship Island are washed away by Hurricane Camille while the Daughters of the Confederacy put up a plaque naming the Rebel soldiers who died there.

The poem that conveys this last information, “Elegy for the Native Guards,” is headed by an epigraph from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Trethewey’s poems confront these violent contradictions with a formal restraint that for me gives them great power.

Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. A nice interview from the Online Newshour on that occasion.

Natasha Trethewey is coming to the Kentucky Women Writers Conference this weekend. She will read at 4:30 Friday afternoon in the Young Library on the University of Kentucky campus. The reading is free and open to the public.

Possibly related posts:

Prizes

The language of the mother

Natasha Trethewey on the recent election

2007 Pulitzer in Poetry

Helen Losse

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